On June 29, the 4th Open AutoDrive Forum (OADF) meeting was held at Club Auto Sport in San Jose, CA, USA. As the first non-European OADF meeting, the objective was to reach companies working on autonomous driving in Silicon Valley along with the rest of the USA. The meeting garnered 85 participants – the highest number since the founding of OADF in December 2015.
The keynote speech was presented by Professor Amnon Shashua, Co-founder and CTO of Mobileye. He provided insights into the way Mobileye is using camera-based ADAS to automate HD maps. This was followed by a presentation by Daniel Bartz from SAE on the SAE J3131 Automated Driving Reference Architecture. Both presentations complemented the work to-date and were an inspiration towards defining the forum’s roadmap.
As many of the attendees were new to the forum, Dr. Volker Sasse of NavInfo, OADF speaker and Chairman of the Navigation Data Standard Association (NDS), introduced the history and organization of OADF. The OADF’s mission is to develop industry-wide accepted state-of-the-art solutions for autonomous driving that are compatible and work in the defined ecosystem. This mission brings together the consortia of ADASIS, NDS, SENSORIS and TISA. All stakeholders active in the field of autonomous driving are welcome to join. Dr. Volker Sasse also took the opportunity to announce that the NDS Association has recently released its Highly Automated Driving (HAD) Lane Model to the public for evaluation purposes. The package is available for download at www.openlanemodel.org.
Prior to lunch, time was dedicated for reports from the OADF task force. Results from previous meetings included agreement on the reference architecture / ecosystem for autonomous driving, as well as the consensus on the process model describing elements needed for creating and using highly reliable maps in autonomous vehicles. An additional report featured a task force by car manufacturers which identified the need for a standardization of the objects represented required for localization. This will be reviewed further within the NDS Association.
The afternoon included breakout sessions on reference architecture, the process model for highly reliable maps, and the roadmap for OADF as a whole. Preliminary results were discussed and further tasks were identified in these sessions.
The 4th OADF meeting was sponsored by the NDS Association and Elektrobit. It was an important step towards establishing the forum in the USA and, in particular, Silicon Valley, with various companies working towards autonomous driving.
The next meeting is scheduled (5th Open AutoDrive Forum) for October 14 at NavInfo in Beijing, China.